Seven years after his sophomore effort, The Yards, impressed critics but failed at the box office, filmmaker James Gray returns to the big screen in fine fashion this week with We Own the Night. Despite the long, difficult process of getting his third film made Gray seems entirely unfazed by it all, his enthusiasm for movies untarnished by the fickle machinations of Hollywood.

Set against the backdrop of escalating tensions between police and Russian mobsters in 1980s New York, We Own the Night is more of a gritty character study than a traditional crime drama, focusing on two brothers situated on opposite sides of the law. "I wasn't really interested in 'cops getting the bad guys,'" explains Gray, "To me, it's kind of an antiquated notion. I was much more interested in this family's life -- the two brothers, the father -- and I didn't want to do anything in which the film was distancing you from the characters."

The film's story grew out of Gray's desire to leave his own imprint on the well-established cop movie genre, a category dominated in recent years by high-concept offerings emphasizing style over substance. "I decided to do something else: a little classical story, very archetypal characters, very mythic situation," says Gray. Indeed, there's an unmistakeable hint of Shakespeare in We Own the Night, with its tale of rival brothers (played by Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg) with confilicting loyalties. Wahlberg plays the good son, a tough-nosed cop in the mold of his father (Robert Duvall). Phoenix plays the black sheep, the manager of a thriving nightclub frequented by drug-dealing members of the Russian Mafia. When cops decide to raid the nightclub, the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of the law.

Underneath the somewhat traditional structure of We Own the Night lies the work of a director who delights in subtly messing with audience expectations. "I didn't want to make a film that was overtly subversive," says Gray. "The style of the picture is almost perfunctory -- there's a kind of no-nonsense thing that I was trying to do -- but I wanted the story and the subtext beneath it to be subversive, to infuriate people in some way."

"Right now 'surface subversive' is in," he adds. "I have a lot of respect for (Babel director) Innaritu, but that's the kind of thing that's very in, mixing up the story and putting the ending in the middle or whatever."

Gray's subversiveness is hinted at from the outset of We Own the Night, as the story opens with a provocative sex scene featuring a nude Eva Mendes. It's an idea that came to him last in the script-writing phase. "I thought about the ending of the movie, which I knew was gonna be this guy who's become a police officer but missed his former life," he reveals. "So what's 180 degrees away from that? It's a guy in his element, making love to a beautiful woman he adores. So I had wanted the opening of the picture to be a slap in the face, to say, 'Here is passion on display.'"

Gray's own passion is clearly on display during the film's climactic chase scene, a terrifying sequence witnessed almost entirely from the vantage point of Phoenix's character, his viewpoint obscured by a torrential downpour. "I wanted to focus on doing the opposite, which is to make it extremely internal," he explains, adding that he watched over 100 classic movie chases scenes before eventually deciding on his approach. "From inside that car, that he witnesses tragic events and is almost powerless to act. He's not the good guy chasing the bad guy; it's the bad guys chasing him. It's the element of weather, it's rain, it's the destiny of the gods basically putting their mark on his life."

More than just an action set-piece, the scene cleverly mirrors the film's plot. "The whole nature of his inability to stop that act as a microcosm of what the film was really about, that he was powerless, that the situations kept piling on him," he asserts. "His life had spun out of control."

We Own the Night opens nationwide this Friday.

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